![]() After the defeat of the War of Independence in 1848-49, the cards were confiscated by the Austrian government, but the Piatnik company started producing the Hungarian Tell card back around 1865. The play, which was performed in Hungary for the first time in 1827, inspired József Schneider a first deck of cards in 1835, cut in copper and richly detailed in red, scarlet, blue, and brown. According to The Playing Card and Its History Thought by Benő Zsoldos, it was published before 1848 and illustrated by the painter József Schneider, who took the lower and upper figures from Friedrich Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell in 1804. My favourite is related to these: it’s the Hungarian pattern. Other notable Queen of Hearts are in the beautiful Vienna Pattern, heavily influenced by the Lyonnais pattern. Elizabeth of York in an XVI Century portrait If you take a look at one of her portraits, currently Hampton Court Palace, you can clearly see why one might think that. According to tradition, the English Queen of Hearts is Elizabeth of York, the unfortunate wife of King Henry VII we can see in Shakespeare’s Richard III. This is when we start seeing a more stern design of cards, a result of Charles Goodall and Son’s reworking the original cards from Ruen. In France, this dates back to 1628, when importing foreign cards was prohibited. In France, this happened in the XIX Century. The English pattern was affirmed, similarly to what happened in France, when the production of playing cards was banned and only approved cards (which had paid a tax) could be manufactured. However, this is not the oldest representation of the Queen nor, probably, the one you have in mind. Veiled in blu, the traditional representation of the Queen of Hearts in the French Portrait holds a red flower in her hands and a red drop on it seems to be signifying a drop of blood. ![]() She’s one of the favourite subjects in the history of art, but you might remember her painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, often compared with the same topic by Caravaggio, in which you can clearly see the kind of feelings Artemisia had towards a certain kind of men, in that period of her life. The biblical Judith, the beautiful widow who teaches everybody a lesson by infiltrating the camp of the Assyrian general Holofernes and, after gaining his trust, she gets him drunk and cuts his head off, bringing it back to her countrymen and rallying them to fight the invaders. In this deck, known as the portrait officiel since 1780 or around that, each figure is associated to a historical and mythical figure and guess who the Queen of Hearts is associated with? ![]() When we are talking about traditional playing cards, lots of us mean the French deck, specifically the so-called Paris pattern. It stands to reason that, as Tenniel suggests, our minds go to the traditional illustrations on playing cards, but here lies the trick: what is the traditional figure for the Queen of Hearts and what are her attributes? ![]() I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiement of ungovernable passions, a blind and aimless fury.īut how do we picture the Queen of Hearts? In his article “Alice on the Stage”, published on The Theatre in April 1887, it’s Carroll himself who provides us with an insight on the significance of her erratic behaviour: We get no clear description of the Queen, in the book: just her furious attitude. In his Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books, Michael Hancher analyzes the drawings to the first edition of the book (not considering Carroll’s own sketches for Alice Underground) and gets in considerable depth around the illustration for the meeting scene, particularly when it comes to the iconography of the cards, so let’s start from there. There, we meet one of the most iconic characters of the book, right alongside the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter: the Queen of Hearts. In Chapter VIII of Alice in Wonderland, Alice finally gets back to where she started through a door in a treetrunk and eventually arrives in the beautiful garden she had seen through the keyhole of the first chapters. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |